Our vision is seared by the ideas in Linked. The bad
news is that the book's recurring image of the far flung network reflects
back on
the book itself. Barabási's chapters leave the reader feeling like she's
been dragged up and down a tortuous network of ideas, gratuitously whipped
from one end to the other of a universe of associations. The mind boggles
as Barabási links the hacker Mafiaboy, the Apostle Paul, Gaetan Dugas,
patient zero in the AID's epidemic, and Google's Larry Page. Sure, each of
these individuals have plugged into their respective networks. But their
relationships to these networks (and to the idea of the scale-free network
in general) are obscured by glare of their differences.
Despite this weakness, Linked is instructive reading. The book
reminds me why major league baseball is nothing if not a network (although
not free-scale); each team can not survive without its peers and
surely league money must be more evenly distributed or the network will
collapse.
Likewise, I'm reminded that much of the glue that holds together the average
church lies in the interaction of the congregation: the dense mesh of
social relationships jerks people out of bed and into church each
week.
And I can see how blogging may help, by replacing the watercooler, to
liberate
link-craving minds from dependence on the traditional office-bounded
network.
Finally, I sense how the atomic family, with just two lone adults nodes
linking to their children, stands little chance against the network mass of
juvenile influences.
Buy the book. How often do you get a chance to radically alter your vision
for less than $20?
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